BuckeyeDubai 🌊🌊🌊

#Resist ImpeachConvictRemoveProsecute.
OhioLos AngelesDubaiLebanon- Currently Atlanta —Buckeyes Lakers Dodgers Browns ChelseaFC —Big time Steely Dan fan

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Carol Burnett rang a CBS vice president over the holidays in 1966 to say she wanted to use a clause in her contract. He asked her what clause she was talking about.

Four years earlier she had signed a ten-year deal with the network that guaranteed her one hour-long special a year and two guest spots on their sitcoms. It was steady, comfortable work.

Her agent had put in one more line. Within the first five years, if Burnett decided she wanted an hour-long comedy variety show, CBS had to put thirty of them on the air, pay or play, whether the network wanted to or not.

Nobody expected her to use it, including her. She had spent years on somebody else's variety programme and doubted she could carry one of her own, so the clause sat there unused while the deadline came closer.

In the final week of the fifth year she and her husband looked at each other and decided to make the call. She was 33.

The executive had to send lawyers to find the clause. He rang back the next day and told her that comedy variety was a man's game, then listed the men who owned it, from Sid Caesar and Jackie Gleason through Milton Berle to Dean Martin. Then he offered her the alternative the network had lined up, a sitcom called Here's Agnes.

She said she did not want to be Agnes. She wanted sketches, guest stars, a repertory company, a 28-piece orchestra and the costume changes that went with all of it.

The contract was the contract, so they put it on the air. The Carol Burnett Show ran eleven years, 279 episodes and 25 Emmys, and she got it by reading a contract back to a man who had forgotten he signed it.

https://t.co/BxPcWFbtwM

[ThePatrioticBlonde™🇺🇸 @ImBreckWorsham]

Sen. Chris Murphy: "A secret payment of at least $187 million to the Trump family, and at least $31 million to the family of Trump's top Middle East adviser. Shortly after, a gift of national security secrets was given to the UAE, which every U.S. president had refused to provide until these secret payments.

This is corruption.

These are elements of bribery.

This is potentially criminal behavior. Republicans may not be willing to do anything about this corruption simply because the president is from your party. For now, Trump and his friends may get away with these crimes and corruption, but the rule of law will return.

When it does, everyone who bribed their way into government service, traded government favors for money, or violated this nation's laws will go to prison."

[sarah @sahouraxo]

Israel has flattened the centuries-old village of Yohmor in South Lebanon.

Nothing remains.

Every civilian home has been razed.

Every. Single. One.

[Molly Jong-Fast @MollyJongFast]

So can we go back to calling it the department of defense?

[Anonymous @YourAnonNews]

'Big' tent, tiny door, one king

[Acyn @Acyn]

Mailman: Our number one ally, Israel—

Martin: Our number one ally? Who suckered us into war?

Rothman: Are you implying the US was dragged into war by Israel?

McGowan: We’re not implying it. That’s what Bibi said.

[Christopher Rixman @ChristoRixman]

There is something incredible about spending the 25th anniversary of 9/11 digging through the old tweets of Abdul El-Sayed, who was 16 years old when the attacks happened, because he later criticized the wars that followed.

Mike Rogers wasn’t 16. He was in Congress.

And he actually voted to authorize the Iraq War.

So somehow the Muslim candidate has a 9/11 problem because he mourned the people killed on 9/11 and later criticized what America did in response, while the guy who actually helped authorize one of the greatest foreign-policy disasters produced by that response gets to lecture him about terrorism.

That seems like the fucking story.

Thanks, Bari, for your continued journalistic excellence!

[Drop Site @DropSiteNews]

“A group of masked settlers beat our team and pummelled the 51 year old woman we were interviewing unconscious,” NBC correspondent reported.

The Palestinian woman, Aida Ahmed Abdullah from the occupied West Bank village of Jalud, near Nablus, was describing how settlers had recently laid siege to and forced her family out of their home when at least four masked men armed with clubs and rocks leaped out, assaulting the journalists and Abdullah.

She was beaten unconscious on camera and rushed to a hospital by the Red Crescent. Correspondent Matt Bradley was struck twice in the arm, and the team's producer, cameraman, and driver all sustained injuries alongside heavily damaged broadcast equipment.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu labeled the attackers "rioters.” Abdullah and the NBC team have since been released from medical care and are recovering from injuries. But NBC News reports on August 30 that the Palestinian woman’s home remains occupied by the Israeli settlers.

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

If you can watch only one video to understand current geopolitics, make it this one by George Yeo, one of Singapore's longest-serving cabinet ministers (23 years!)

As Yeo explains, current global geopolitics is fundamentally driven by US "retreat" and "decline", forced by a financial reality that no US administration can reverse: its debt servicing already exceeding its entire defense budget.

To Yeo, this explains why the US insists so much that its "allies" in Europe and Asia spend more of their GDP on defense - to basically pick up the tab for an empire America can no longer afford - but it also means that, inevitably, "once your allies begin to have their own military capabilities, they will think differently, and they will not follow you in everything that you want to do."

As such, American decline becomes self-reinforcing: the more it asks allies to carry their own weight, the less reason they have to follow its lead.

Still, Yeo says that a similar dynamic to one that happened after the fall of Rome could occur where America - like Byzantium did - sheds its empire and consolidates around its own hemisphere, allowing it to remain self-sustaining and powerful for a very long time.

He believes it's the direction things are heading - which would also explain Trump's obsession with Canada and Greenland.

It remains however obviously an open question whether an American "Byzantium strategy" is even achievable: Canada, for one, clearly wants no part of it.

Full video available here: https://t.co/99APyQjG3q

[Trita Parsi @tparsi]

So when you read about eight members of an NBC News Team being beaten by Israeli settlers today in the West Bank, it's important to note two things:

1. The settler wouldn't do this to Americans had they not received a green light from the Israeli gov.
2. Israel's gov would not have given such a green light unless it felt confident that the US gov - and Amb. Huckabee - wouldn't lift a finger to defend the Americans.

[Progressive Seal @ProgressiveSeal]

So here is my AOC 2028 take at this point.

She needs to run for the sake of the party. It would force every other hopeful to pivot their positions to the left or be seen as out of touch with voters.

Then if it isn’t going well she can still dropout and pursue the Senate seat.

[sarah @sahouraxo]

Israel is setting South Lebanon on fire — deliberately burning forests and olive groves that are older than Israel itself.

Where is the international outrage?

Where is the global condemnation?

[Acyn @Acyn]

Pritzker: I have to worry about whether people can eat lettuce or blueberries off a grocery shelf because Trump is doing away with food inspections.

I have to track measles outbreaks because the president put a madman in charge of vaccine recommendations.

I have to monitor the movements of ICE agents because he handed guns to people who couldn’t pass a background check, frankly, to work in an animal shelter.

I have to find money that we don’t have to fight problems that didn’t exist before Donald Trump. It’s the reality of being a governor in America today. I’m not the only one.

[Fifty Shades of Whey @davenewworld_2]

Internal estimates at the Pentagon put the overall cost of Trump's war with Iran to be between $80 billion and $100 billion, which is significantly higher than what's been publicly disclosed.

Here's a short list of items that USA could've spent that money on instead of wasting $100 billion on weapons contractors, damaged bases, destroyed aircraft, etc.:

- Fund an entire year of SNAP for 42 million people
- Give $1 million to every single one of America's public schools
- Pay every public-school teacher a one-time bonus of $31,000
- Replace every estimated remaining lead service line in the country
- Modernize the entire national transit-bus fleet
- Invest in flood protection to prevent roughly $200 billion to $300 billion in future damage
- Cover about 25 million student-years of public community-college tuition
- Pay the standard Medicare Part B premium for 41 million beneficiaries for 1 year
- Give $5.9 million to every public library in America

[Nick Mark MD @nickmmark]

This is a great opportunity for people to learn the difference between a coroner and a medical examiner.

A medical examiner is a physician who is trained in pathology, an expert in determining the cause of death.

A coroner is literally anybody who wants the job.

[Ro Khanna @RoKhanna]

SoftBank, a Japanese company, gave $50 million to Trump’s library.

Months later, the administration announced a deal allowing SoftBank to build a data center on federal land.

We will expose and put an end to this pay to play when we win back the House.
https://t.co/gYWWBPaDZo

[Ron Filipkowski @RonFilipkowski]

This is one of the most pathetic performances I’ve ever seen. What a loser.

[Occupy Democrats @OccupyDemocrats]

BREAKING: “LAKE SOMETHING!” NFL broadcast legend Al Michaels mercilessly mocks Trump’s ridiculous Great Lakes renaming stunt on live TV!

Legendary NFL announcer Al Michaels just delivered one of the cleanest, funniest burns of the year – and he never even said Trump’s name.

During the Thursday Night Football preseason game in Cleveland, the broadcast returned from a commercial with a sweeping aerial shot of the stadium and the massive body of water beyond it.

“That is Lake Erie,” Michaels began, before hesitating with a delicious pregnant pause. “We think it is still called Lake Erie. We’re not quite sure at this point.”

Tee hee!

A moment later he added: “We’ll be by Lake something-like-Ontario or whatever it’s going to be called by the time we get to Buffalo.”

At 81, and with a half-century track record of excellence under his belt, Michaels has no f*cks left to give, nor qualms about roasting the idiocy of Trump’s latest boondoggle, which directed the government to start calling Lake Ontario the oh-so-clever and well considered “Lake America.”

Part of his moronic and counterproductive trade war with Canada, the order only changes U.S. federal usage anyway, because he does NOT actually have the power to rename the Canadian half of an international lake.

But that’s never stopped him. Trump’s earlier attempt to rebrand the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America was met with similar ridicule and derision. Now he’s out here redrawing the map like properties on a Monopoly board.

The beauty of Michaels’ jab is how effortless it was. He didn’t need a speech or a partisan rant – he just treated Trump’s cartographic power trip like the obvious joke it is, and sensed the audience would get it immediately.

After fifty years of calling the biggest games in American sports, Al Michaels knows his viewers can put two and two together. And for anyone who couldn’t for one reason or another, he had a helpful suggestion.

[Aaron Rupar @atrupar]

FOX BUSINESS: What is your pitch to voters on healthcare? What are Republicans doing right?

REP. MIKE LAWLER: We strengthened the Medicaid program by rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse

(The "big beautiful bill" Lawler supported cut $1 TRILLION from Medicaid ... )